Rapture of the Nerds

I'm starting to get the feeling the Singularity subgenre only really has one good book in it. It's an amazing and powerful idea, but most of the novels based around the idea simply don't do it justice. That's partly because the actual implementation of the singularity would be incomprehensible for us mere humans, but I don't know whether than is really a good enough explanation for the silliness that these books tend towards.

Stross & Doctorow's Rapture of the Nerds has a bunch of interesting ideas in it, but in lots of ways those are rehashed from previous books in the genre. The characters are the usual wild and wacky types you get in a singularity novel, battering up against forces for more powerful than themselves and fighting to retain their humanity in the face of an overwhelmingly digital world. But the plot of the novel tended towards the deus ex machina and the Chosen One trope, so it was quite unsatisfying and occasionally annoying.

The Difference Engine

I wasn't as impressed as I had expected to be by the Difference Engine - it's certainly an interesting idea, and full of clever ideas; and it's pretty much the origin of the whole Steampunk movement. But as a story it was a meandering collage of happenings across a collection of not-very-engaging characters.

It's an alternative history in which Charles Babbage successfully built his Difference Engine and went on to build an Analytical Engine, creating a world in which steam powered computers were functional and becoming widely used. Many other fancies of the steam age also came to pass - fast steam cars and the like. Britain's hereditary nobility were then overthrown by Babbage and Lord Byron, who instituted a new regime in which the Radical Lords ran the country. It's a very interesting alternative world, and it's no wonder that the Steampunk genre has so adherents.

As a novel, though, it left a lot to be desired, and the central conceit (only revealed right at the end) is vague and confusing, and leaves the reader wonder what the hell it was all really about.